The term "Palestinians" tends mainly to be used as a short form for the Palestinian people, defined as equivalent to Palestinian Arabs, i.e., an Arabic-speaking people descended from the people who have lived in Palestine over the centuries. This usage may be intended to imply that other residents of Palestine (historical or otherwise), particularly Palestinian Jews, are not Palestinians.
Types of Palestinian identity past and present
By geography, pre-1948
Prior to the 1948 Palestine war and the establishment of the State of Israel, a "Palestinian" could mean any person who was born in or hailed from the region of Palestine or was a citizen of the Mandatory Palestine. The term covered all the inhabitants of the region, including people from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds, and all ethnicities, including the Dom people, Samaritans, Druze, Bedouins and the traditional Jewish communities of Palestine, or Old Yishuv, whose ancestors already living there prior to the onset of Zionist immigration.
By geography, post-1948
In the aftermath of the 1948 Palestine war and the establishment of the State of Israel, a "Palestinian" tends to refer to individuals from non-Jewish communities born in the West Bank and Gaza, and citizens of the State of Palestine, including the populations of Palestinian refugees living in the wide Middle East and other Palestinian diaspora populations worldwide.
In Israel, former Palestinian Jews that acquired Israeli citizenship became Israelis, while non-Jewish Palestinians that acquired Israeli citizenship came to be referred to as Israeli Arabs or Druze.
The Jewish Virtual Library notes: "Although anyone with roots in the land that is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is technically a Palestinian, the term is now more commonly used to refer to non-Jew Arabs with such roots ... Most of the world's Palestinian population is concentrated in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jordan, although many Palestinians live in Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries."
Palestinian refugees
UNRWA defines the Palestinian refugees as those whose normal place of residence between June 1946 and May 1948 was in the land that is now Israel, but they went outside during the 1948 war. UNRWA, however, provides aid to Palestinian refugees defined as such, as well as the descendants of those Palestinians. UNRWA does define "Palestinian refugees" to include descendants of "refugees".
By ethnic grouping
The word "Palestinian" is also sometimes used by ethnographers and linguists to denote the specific Arab subculture of the southern Levant; in that sense, it includes not only the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine, but also those inhabitants of Jordan who are originally from Palestine and the Druze, while excluding both Bedouin (who culturally and linguistically group with the Arabian Peninsula) and ethnic minorities such as the Dom, the Circassians, and the Samaritans.